There's nothing quite like the desperation to communicate with loved ones we've lost — and it's that desire that fuels Thomas Pierce's richly imaginative debut novel The Afterlives.
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The second volume in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet takes place over a tense family Christmas in Cornwall that reunites two sisters whose lives have taken vastly diverging paths.
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A new collection features five stand-alone stories by Johnson, who died in 2017. Critic Maureen Corrigan says The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is "the kind of work every writer would like to go out on."
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In Chloe Benjamin's new book, four siblings growing up on the Lower East Side amid the upheavals of the 1960s gain forbidden, life-changing knowledge: The exact year and date of their deaths.
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Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer live by a new self-help book for each episode of their podcast By the Book, so they're experts on which ones might really help us keep our New Year's resolutions.
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Nick Harkaway's big, ambitious new book is about pretty much everything, from ancient Egypt to a future utopia that actually seems utopian at first, until an inconvenient death disrupts everything.
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From its first appearance, Star Trek has always been hopeful about the relationship between society and technology. Ethan Siegel doesn't lose sight of this in his book, Treknology, says Adam Frank.
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Michael Wolff's incendiary new book about the first year of Donald Trump's presidency has plenty of juicy detail about chaos, infighting and cheeseburgers — but it's best read with a grain of salt.
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Classicist Mary Beard's new book — a compilation of two of her lectures — traces current strains of misogyny back to the ancient world (one 7th century B.C. poet compared women to yapping dogs).
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This month, we acknowledge that love actually is all around, with three romances that range from Victorian London to modern-day Mumbai — to the clash and clamor of an American football stadium.
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The characters Neel Mukherjee's new novel all want better lives, and — to say the least — they're seldom rewarded. A State of Freedom is a dark, brutal read, but also surprisingly beautiful.
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In Bitch Planet: Triple Feature, creators Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro turn a score of talented writers and artists loose in the world of their futuristic feminist dystopia comic.
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Ursula K. Le Guin's mastery of fiction has remained so consistent, it's easy to overlook her accomplishments in other forms — but her new nonfiction collection goes a long way towards fixing that.
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Every year, critic John Powers is haunted by the things he wishes he'd reviewed. The themes his 2017 "Ghost List" range in spirit from cosmic surrealism to ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy.
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Fresh Air's book critic says her 2017 list is chaotic in a good way. "These books zing off in all directions: They're fresh, unruly and dismissive of the canned and contrived."
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Escape from the holiday whirl with three tasty romances, featuring a duke with an epic library, a young girl finding herself in the big city and a proper lady finding love where she least expects it.
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A central figure in 20th century poetry, Pound was also an outspoken fascist. In The Bughouse, Daniel Swift investigates whether or not the poet's politics and madness matter to his work.
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This season's secret weapon in literary banter will be Mrs. Caliban, a peculiar, wonderful, overlooked 1983 novella by Rachel Ingalls, about a housewife whose life is upended by a suave frog monster.
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Wilson — the first woman to translate The Odyssey — has created a fresh, authoritative and slyly humorous version of Homer's epic that scours away archaisms while preserving nuance and complexity.
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Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier's book is part memoir, part history of the development of VR, and an unexpected but welcome comparison of the promises of VR with those of artificial intelligence.
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